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Roses Bloom on a Wednesday

Last week we were all hosting the Leap Day Thread Giveaway, but today I’m back in the saddle with those Works–in–Progress (WIPs) and linking up to Freshly Pieced. Thanks, Lee, for hosting us all!

Today’s WIP is both a finish and an acknowledgement that I’ve got miles to go before anyone sleeps under this quilt! It might soon be morphing into a wall-hanging, and let’s hope I finish it before I run out of good televison and movies to watch. Now that Downton Abbey‘s off-season, I’ve resorted to The Big Bang Theory. Which is pretty funny, considering I’m married to a scientist and we both work in academia.

Here’s block two, all finished up. I left the papers in the outside pieces as I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. I did put block one as the wallpaper on my laptop, and I smile every time it pops up. It’s both digital and tangible–digital on the screen, yet the satisfied feeling I get when I see it, is tangible. (I have another quilt on my phone as wallpaper for that device. I’m populating my universe with my quilts.

And here they are–the twins.

I looked in Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Quilt Patterns to track down the real name. In 1935, The Old Chelsea Station Needlecraft Service, a mail-order company, published a variant of the block as the “Rose Star One Patch.” Later on, other names were “Canadian Conventional Star,” the “Colonial Flower Garden,” and simply “Hexagons.” I trend towards calling it the Rose Window Block, only because it reminds of. . . what else? Rose windows.

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Here are some from our travels in Europe and Canada. (With a couple of others you’ll recognize.)

I wanted to focus in on one shown in the slideshow above.
While not technically rose windows, the sweet little rounds on this wall of windows in Santa Croce (in Florence) are quintessential Italy.

Create

"The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing: it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills." ~Arthur Koestler